Building SEO-Focused Pages to Serve Topics & People Rather than Keywords & Rankings - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

With updates like Hummingbird, Google is getting better and better at determining what's relevant to you and what you're looking for. This can actually help our work in SEO, as it means we don't have to focus quite so intently on specific keywords.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains how focusing on specific kinds of people and the topics they're interested in can be even more effective in driving valuable traffic than ranking for specific keywords.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard:

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans and welcome to another edition of "Whiteboard Friday." This week, I want to talk to you a little bit about the classic technique of building SEO pages for keywords and rankings versus the more modern technique of trying to do this with people and topics in mind. So, let me walk you through the classic model and show you why we've needed to evolve.

So, historically, SEO has really been about keyword rankings. It's "I want to rank well for this keyword because that particular keyword sends me traffic that is of high quality. The value of the people visiting my site from that is high." The problem is, this doesn't account for other types of traffic, channels, and sources, right? We're just focused on SEO.

This can be a little bit problematic because it can mean that we ignore things like social and content marketing opportunities and email marketing opportunities. But, okay. Let's stick with it. In order to do this, we do some keyword research. We figure out which terms and phrases are popular, which ones are high and low competition, which ones we expect to drive high-quality traffic.

We create some landing pages for each of these terms and phrases. We get links. And we optimize that content so that hopefully, it performs well in the search engines. And then we measure the success of this process based on both the ranking itself. But also, the keywords that drive traffic to those pages. And whether people who visit coming from those keywords are high-quality visitors.

And then we decide "Yeah, I'm not ranking so well for this keyword. But gosh, it's sending great traffic. Let me focus more on this one." Or "Oh, I am ranking well for this. But the keyword is not sending me high-quality traffic. So, it doesn't matter that much. I'm going to ignore it because of the problems."

So, a lot of times, creating these landing pages with each particular term and phrase is doing a lot of unnecessary overlapping work, right? Even if you're not doing this sort of hyper, slight modifications of each phrase. "Brown bowling shoes," "red bowling shoes," "blue bowling shoes." Maybe you could just have a bowling shoes page and then have a list of colors to choose from. Okay.

But even still, you might have "bowling shoes" and "shoes for going bowling." And "shoes for indoor sports," all of these different kinds of things that could have a considerable amount of overlap. And many different topic areas do this.

The problem with getting links and optimizing these individual pages is that you're only getting a page to rank for one particular term or maybe a couple of different terms, versus a group of keywords in a topic that might all be very well-served by the same content, by the same landing page.

And by the way, because you're doing this, you're not putting in the same level of effort, energy, quality and improvement, right? Because it's an improvement into making this content better and better. You're just trying to churn out landing page after landing page.

And then, if you're measuring success based on the traffic that the keyword is sending, this isn't even possible anymore. Because Google has taken away keyword referral data and given us (not provided) instead.

And this is why we're seeing this big shift to this new model, this more modern model, where SEO is really about the broad performance of search traffic across a website, and about the broad performance of the pages receiving search visits. So, this means that I look at a given set of pages, I look at a section of my site, I look at content areas that I'm investing in, and I say "Gosh, the visits that come from Google, that come from Bing, that come from Image Search, whatever they are, these are performing at a high quality, therefore, I want to invest more in SEO." Not necessarily "Oh, look. This keyword sent me this good traffic."

I'm still doing keyword research. I'm still using that same process, right? Where I go and I try to figure out "Okay, how many people are searching for this term? Do I think they're going to be high-quality visitors? And is the competition low enough to where I think my website can compete?"

I'm going to then define groups of terms and phrases that can be well-served by that content. This is very different. Instead of saying "Blue bowling shoes" and "Brown bowling shoes," I'm saying, "I think I can have one great page around bowling shoes, in general, that's going to serve me really well. I'm going to have all different kinds, custom bowling shoes and all these different things."

And maybe some of them deserve their own individual landing pages, but together, this group of keywords can be served by this page. And then these individual ones have their own targeted pages.

From there, I'm going to optimize for two things that are a little bit different than what I've done in the past. Both keyword targeting and being able to earn some links. But also, an opportunity for amplification.

That amplification can come from links. It could come from email marketing, it could come from social media. It could come from word-of-mouth. But, regardless, this is the new fantastic way to earn those signals that seem to correlate with things ranking well.

Links are certainly one of them. But we don't need the same types of direct anchor text that we used to need. Broad links to a website can now help increase our domain authority, meaning that all of our content ranks well.

Google certainly seems to be getting very good at recognizing relevancy of particular websites around topic areas. Meaning that if I've done a good job in the past of showing Google that I'm relevant for a particular topic like bowling shoes. When I put together custom, graphic-printed, leather bowling shoes pages, that page might rank right away. Even if I haven't done very much work to specifically earn links to it and get anchor text and those kinds of things, because of the relevancy signals I've built up in the past. And that's what this process does.

And now, I can measure success based on how the search traffic to given landing pages is performing. Let me show you an example of this.

And here, I've got my example. So, I'm focusing beyond bowling shoes. I'm going to go with "Comparing mobile phone plans," right? So, let's say that you're putting together a site and you want to try and help consumers who are looking at different mobile phone plans, figure out which one they should go with, great.

So, "Compare mobile phone plans" is where you're starting. And you're also thinking about 'Well, okay. Let me expand beyond that. I want to get broad performance." And so, I'm trying to get this broad audience to target. Everyone who is interested in this topic. All these consumers.

And so, what are things that they also might be interested in? And I'll do some keyword research and some subject matter research. Maybe I'll talk to some experts, I'll talk to some consumers. And I'll see providers, they're looking for different phone providers. They might use synonyms of these different terms. They might have some concept expansion that I go through as I'm doing my keyword research.

Maybe I'm looking for queries that people search for before and after. So, after they make the determination if they like this particular provider, then they go look at phones. Or after they determine they like this phone, they want to see which provider offers that phone. Fine, fair.

So, now, I'm going to do this definition of the groups of keywords that I care about. I have comparison in my providers. Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T. Comparison of phones, the Galaxy, iPhone, Nexus, by price or features. What about people who are really heavy into international calling or family plans or travel a lot? Need data-heavy stuff or doing lots of tethering to their laptops.

So, this type of thing is what's defining the pages that I might build by the searcher's intent. When they search for keywords around these topics, I'm not necessarily sure that I'm going to be able to capture all of the keywords that they might search for and that's okay.

I'm going to take these specific phrases that I do put in my keyword research. And then, I'm going to expand out to, "All right, I want to try and have a page that reaches all the people who are looking for stuff like this." And Google's actually really helping you with search algorithms like Hummingbird, where they're expanding the definition of what keyword relevancy and keyword matching is really meaning.

And that page is going to feature things like "I want to show the price of the services relative to time over time. I want to show which phones they have available." And maybe pull in some expert ratings and reviews for those particular phones. Maybe I'll toss in CNET's rating on each of the phones and link over to that.

What add-ons do they have? What included services? Do I maybe want to link out to some expert reviews? Can I have sorting so that I can say "Oh, I only want this particular phone. So, show me only the providers that have got that phone" or those types of things.

And then, I'm going to take this and I'm going to launch it. All this stuff, all these features are not just there to help be relevant to the search query. They're to help the searcher and to make this worthy of amplification.

And then, I can use the performance of all the search traffic that lands on any version of this page. So, this page might have lots of different URLs based on the sorting or what features I select or whatever that is. Maybe I rel canonical them or maybe I don't, because I think it can be expanded out and serve a lot of these different needs. And that's fine, too.

But this, this is a great way to effectively determine the ROI that I've gotten from producing this content, targeting these searchers. And then, I can look at the value from other channels in how search impacts social and social impacts search by looking at multi-channel and multi-touch. It's really, really cool.

So, yes. SEO has gotten more complex. It's gotten harder. There's a little bit of disassociation away from just the keyword and the ranking. But this process still really works and it's still very powerful. And I think SEOs are going to be using this for a long time to come. We just have to have a switch in our mentality.

All right, everyone. I look forward to the comments. And we'll see you again next week for another edition of "Whiteboard Friday." Take care.

When Kate Morris published here her post about Topical Optimization, I presented a practical example, that I consider fits very well also here.

Not knowing if you had read that comment, I take the freedom to republish it here below:

Let say your client is a small pizzas chain with more than one place in New York.

Once you would be discussing about ranking for "Pizzas in New York" for the home page, "Pizzas in SOHO", "pizzas in NOLITA", "pizzas in Tribeca", etc. etc. for the internal pizzerias pages... and create optimized pages just for those keywords.

Now... let's think about the entities we have for a site like that:

Pizza > Organic Food > all the ingredients related to a Pizza (if the chain is intelligent, they also sell Pizza with Nutella...);

New York and all its neighborhoods > which leads to the people living in them

Search Entities related to common questions like (and remember that many of them are also location sensitive, therefore a mobile strategy is essential):

How

When

What

Why

How much

How many

And I could go on.

Creating a website around those topic, making of a restaurant page not just a page with the map, address and a SEO optimized text (i.e.: "Our pizzeria in Tribeca is open 24th. If you are in Tribeca,come and enjoy our 1000 different kind of pizza whenever you want in our pizzeria!" sigh), but a hub with snippet of internal in-depth pages about Tribeca and its events (hey! there's a movie festival), about the pizzaioli and the people attending the pizzeria on a regular basis, about the most its sold kind of pizza and so on, then you are creating a page which is not only more topically relevant for Google for "Pizzeria in Tribeca" (and all the stemmed related "keywords"), but also far more useful for the users.

If you explain all this to your client, involving him (who better know those Entities his business is all about better than him?), then you will see how not only he won't you stress you too much on keywords' ranking (he will still do it, from time to time), but he will be more keen to accept a more holistic and inbound marketing vision for his website.

"Links are certainly one of them. But we don't need the same types of direct anchor text that we used to need. Broad links to a website can now help increase our domain authority, meaning that all of our content ranks well."

This is what most of the webmasters (doing spam link building) need to learn. Awesome WBF again :)

Excellent Rand - thank you - that's been my thinking for quite a while now, even pre-Hummingbird, but since Hummingbird the need for SEOs to have a paradigm shift has been increasingly evident and in this WBF, you have brought the new paradigm very well into focus.

As you mentioned, understanding the searcher's intent is the focus of Google's attention and so has to be ours. By building high quality, topic-based content we can therefore increase the opportunities for a site to be found because a searcher's intent is much broader than the query they entered when they searched.

To add to that and to our keyword research, I think we need we need to remember that Google is providing results not only on semantics of a search, but also results that are personalised. So by considering ways which the people searching could be seeing some results personalised to them, that may help to broaden our understanding of their intent and therefore the content we provide.

Thank you Rand. This is definitely a need-to-watch-again WBF. We have a lot to learn and the more we learn and understand the new paradigm, the more we will naturally adopt it.

SEO definitely is team oriented in my mind. Especially when taking on many clients at a time. Separation into blog writing, onsite, offsite with people having different roles they can become better and better at (since SEO is always changing and needs to be studied constantly).

Thanks for the WBF topic, Rand. This could not have come at a better time.

However...I am just a bit confused. I am about to undertake a complete site redesign that will triple site traffic that converts into web form submissions. I don't want to go about recreating the site incorrectly and want to future proof its pages.

So, I get it. I should focus on more umbrella topics and try to serve good content that will attract more people and lead them to discover deeper pages on my site. However, as far as I know, the search engines still care very much about meta data and schema markup. So, how would you suggest I go about title tag creation, meta descriptions, location schema, etc.? Originally, I would focus on one or two words and write a title that includes those words, write a meta description that does the same, and then optimize the content and images around those words. Now, I am confused on what to do with the mechanics of the page versus the content. Also, if new information in my area of topic focus comes out, or I discover a related topic umbrella that I have not yet tapped into, should I no longer create a new page or pages, but rather try and work the new concept into existing content and meta data? Can someone shed some light, please? Rand? Anyone?

Gianluca's comment shines some light on this, and Kate Morris' blog post http://moz.com/blog/stop-thinking-keywords-think-topics helps, too. The idea is to take a group of keywords that all have the same searcher intent and focus on that intent rather than just the keywords themselves. Writing compelling titles and meta descriptions that include your key terms is still a good idea, but your goal should be to have a page that makes a searcher for any topics around those terms happy.

Well said Rand! Actually if we optimize for our buyer personas rather than search engines, we definitely gonna have a better keyword ranking as well. Although links are important, but generating a good user experience is what is all about making a brand loyal customer.

The users intend is extremely important. Writing to broad and to many little sites could increase the bounce back rate which will harm you at the end. Especially if there is to little or not useful information for your target group.

Very astute observation Vahe and thanks for the link. I think this new feature from GA combined with Rand's suggestions has incredible potential to create powerful results. In this case, Rand's WBF plus this new feature in GA means 1 + 1 = 3 (or more!) - You are right, great timing. Combining these two might make for an interesting future YouMoz post!

Most of the Bloggers compromise good content to get better search results. I used to commit this mistake when I started my blogging carrier. It is a very useful article. Again, mindblowing article of WhiteBoard Friday.

Thank! you Rand. I agree when we focus on searcher intent and include long tail keywords then we do not have to think about the length of the content. The content will automatically becomes lengthy and cover maximum number of search query answers in just one content

It's a very timely point, and as per usual - another one which is harder in ecom terms. It's a fine line between creating a great landing page and killing conversion rate, and one which I'm sure Google is also looking into. If a user searches for "blue sweater" - do they want a page with information on them (brands, fabrics, colours, fit etc), or do they just want a page with a bunch of blue sweaters?

That's where this method becomes slightly more tricky, as reason would suggest you combine the two, which again is easier said than done - especially for consumers who land on the page from a different entry point. Ahh digital, always giving us fresh challenges :)

Although it's unfortunate that we don't have much keyword data to use anymore, I'm glad that it has allowed me to solely focus on producing relevant content to the topic as opposed to the keyword.

As with most people, I was reliant on Google's keyword data before and optimised my tech articles around these.

Once that data got taken away, I started to write a little more liberally, using keyword variations and synonyms (as you mentioned), and it has worked out anyway! I still get articles on page 1 or 2 bringing in a decent amount of traffic.

Excellent post you shared, its very true that after humming bird update Google gives you actual info about what you actually want. Very helpful tips you described in this post about keyword. Everybody said that SEO is dead, but actually its become complex not dead.

Humminbird is an infrastructural update by Google to produce search results based on relevancy of query, searcher's intent, keywords meaning.Does this mean that instead of individual pages for each keyword, we should have one long content rich informative page? Does anybody have able to measure the success ratio with this approach for #SEO?

Can you guys please help me in a problem. Its about SEO for a website in two languages. I have a website in English and Danish language. So how i will do its SEO. Either I do this in English or in Danish or in both? kindly guide me in it.

Yes! and as a beginner trying to figure out what content, keywords, etc to write, this allows me to feel confident that i can write to my audience rather than figuring out what a bot wants. I always found it difficult and overwhelming to adjust to multiple pages of the same topic with different keywords. Now I can focus on writing more information on what my clients are actually wanting to read!

And the most important metric is that the client is happy because they see their business on the first page of google.

I know that the goal of SEO work is to increase sales, drive engagement, enhance the bottom line while also providing relevant results to a consumer. After all, why would a business spend money of SEO if they weren't looking for some ROI? But the truth is that if we use the Classic Approach, we can achieve all that without re-inventing the wheel.

Great post Rand! I am so glad that finally old school SEO has fading fast! At least now SEO is revolving around thinking about user's intent and needs rather than a set of keywords. The best part is alot of the dodgey companies promising top rankings for a set of keywords are finding it difficult to keep up with hummingbird update which will really freshen up the SEO industry and give rise to SEO professionals who practice SEO from a holistic point of view!

Great article. I find the topic very interesting but at the same time I am more confused than ever....

I only found this post today so maybe this is too late to get any comments on this. We just launched a property portal targeting one country. We have a main page for each area which is "vacations rentals in area X" and then we have "apartments for rent in area X" and also "Villas&Houses for rent in area X".

From my point of view this is logical as if a client is searching for "apartments for rent in area X" he should see such a page immediately without having to find the search filters and then select to only see apartments.....

Or I am wrong in my reasoning and it would be better to simply have one page about "rentals in area X" and not have any individual pages targeting "apartments for rent" and "villas and houses for rent" in any area?

Sorry for the long question but I thought I could best show it by a real example.

Thanks for good articles but my question - what is best way to get a site 1st page in Google & time frame? I am trying for http://thehartcentre.com.au/city/sydney/ by Keyword - "Relationship counselling Sydney"

I really enjoyed this WBF! In copy editing a lot of online articles, I find it incredibly difficult to get authors (many who are working for SEO firms) to stop using rich keywords and localized links. No matter how many examples or resource sites we point them to go read (they won't, or don't).

While many of us realize that the modern way of link building (as described by Rand) is extremely effective and the way things should (must?) be done going forward, I still think it may be quite some time to see that acceptance filter down to content writers. Yes, many SEOs and agencies use 3rd party writers, but they aren't defining how they want that content written well enough, or at all.

Absolutely Good work Rand, Thank you so much. Really SEO is not dead it is become more complex . I add my experience here . I have not good ranking for my website but still I am getting the good leads.Really I never thought that it may happen to me because I was waiting for improving my ranking from last 6 months but very few keywords are coming on first page still i have clients but frankly I do not how leads are coming. I am doing my SEO work continuously last 6 months.

You know how you can listen to a song, for example, and a certain turn of phrase really hits you and sticks with you? Or you read one in a book? These instances are rare but, when read something that is phrased in a precise and meaningful way, you never forget the phrase. Creating content that is "worthy of amplification" meets that standard!

Rand- great job as usual! What you are saying is right on point with the current direction of SEO as an industry (or should be) We've been doing exactly what you are saying here for several months now- our landing pages focus on good utility and answering the user's intent (or buyers intent).. and our link building efforts focus on groups/categories rather than the old way of hyper-focusing on keywords. In addition our performance metrics have switched to overall 'page value' rather than keyword rankings.. so bravo to you for staying on top of this and helping educate the SEO pros out there- and glad to see my company is on the right track. :-)

Creating semantic maps is a must form current-day on-page SEO. We're frustrated when clients demand "but what exact keywords will you get me ranking for?" After their traffic and conversion picks up, they soon stop asking.

Rand Your post is good enough and I think if you have more focus on creating content for users not for search engine it result you a huge traffic because Google believe on this statement and after hummingbird quality content is the best approach also social signals are more helpful for this.

What I find funny is that now sites rank on the first page in Google who even don't have the search term on the site at all. Example: When I search in Germany "Health Pomegranate" (DE: Gesundheit Granatapfel) I get on position 3 a site of health magazine that talks about health and fruits without even mentioning the term "Granatapfel". That's the power of the Hummingbird-Update.

Awesome! And I really like this new scope if creating actually relevant content for topics instead of just ''lets build articles with this KW and have 2% density and have this many links .. etc'' Is my belief that offering value to the user is what makes any business online and offline do well and Google as you mentioned is shifting their algorithms to exactly that.

Another research based article with real time factorial points by Rand. I love it very well and expecting to implement the discussed points for my Client as well. Getting desired ranking in Search Engine for specific key phrase becomes latter part of the SEO while acquire and promote the landing page that generate traffic to have considered as first!

Finally, rand back on WBF with an awesome idea!! We all were in a dilemma on the secure server effect and was cracking our head to tackle the situation. But rand, i would salute you for this awesome concept...

Within the situation, we all know that we cant get any info about keywords that bring traffic to our website. Still we know the bunch of keywords that can bring potential traffic. Instead of expecting certain contribution from each keyword, we can expect some amount of traffic from a content bucket... This is what hummingbird also pointing... Broad your keywords and provide as much as data (related) info on your core topic..

Great post. It's a principle that we've been using for a while. Build quality content that answers a specific need. If you build it, they will come. And share. Backing into a result for a specific rank has always seemed backwards.

If you are creating website for objective to gain ranking then you are moving to google spam circle but if you focus on user and optimize the website for user first and then for Search Engine then i think you are sake side.

Outstanding publish you distributed, its very real that after singing fowl upgrade Search engines gives you real details about what you actually want. Very beneficial suggestions you described in this publish about keyword and key phrase. Everybody said that SEO is deceased, but actually its become complicated not deceased.

Thank god we still have keyword research, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it disappear in the near future. I think that it would help broaden our Seo efforts that much more. Great WBF once again Rand Seo's just have to tweak there habits by understanding link behavior and how to acquire links and once they figure that out there world will become a better place. After all we are Inbound Marketers!

Content Should be related to target page & informative....U have to think like this we are visitor what ever questions coming to our mind as a customer, we have to put that information in our website...means User friendly content & that time we have to give intention some key points which is search engine friendly, like our targeted keyword should be in URL directory name, Title Tag, Meta Description, H1 tag (main Header Tag), & give all information with proper heading & Anchor.

Post not provided - and definitely post Hummingbird - it's going to make a lot of sense for SEOs to focus on page level metrics rather than keyword metrics. Obviously most of the keyword data is gone anyway, but even if it wasn't, Hummingbird would have made reporting on keywords more difficult because of the search engine's improvement in keyword/topic association.

What Rand talked about essentially boils down to creating resources and/or places of expertise that cover ALL aspects of a particular product, subject, or industry. These are the types of projects that I've been recommending for my clients that are fantastic for generating leads and can be easily traced back for ROI. It's also easy to see how content marketing and SEO are molding together in Rand's example.

To be fair that was my instinctive approach since I was not mastering Keyword research so I released a couple of articles on different topics on my website then analyzed the organic traffic and updated posts depending on referrals keyword that I could grab either via GWT or GA. For instance a popular post I produced was speaking about ranking in 20 steps "Référencement en 20 étapes" (french) since it was republished by some others including very popular "secrets2moteurs.com" I've updated the article using primary keywords and since that time (March 2012) I'm just monitoring page performance and do not care about keywords as far as the traffic is still relevant (low BR, returning visitors....). So yes I'm big advocate of this technique and would add tagging pages with topic in GA allows organic traffic breakdown by site category. NICE to see that we're back to this approach which is more white hat.

I think the core of the approach is spot-on: going after the users' intent and providing the content to meet their needs. So much more refreshing than simply focusing on keywords and if they are on the page or not. Thanks Rand!

I like to concept of "Amplification" when creating SEO content. It's not just about matching new content to a specific keyword phrase but re-engineering your website so apart from solving people queries - most of the times the same queries can be typed on such a different ways and languages - at different knowledge levels - people who know nothing, people who know a bit, people who think they know but they don't, people who are experts - All these people have queries within the same topic that possibly can be grouped and if curated properly (compelling, unique, relevant) can have a powerful amplification wave via social media.

Facebook Graph search - just released in America - is trying to bring that contextual and intimate (friends) element that traditional search engines lack; however, I am great believer brands still need to just not create content for queries but content that people will possibly never asked for ( cause They did not know it could possibly exist). The surprise factor is what brings massive ways of amplification and - if lucky - website's traffic crashes.

Relevant keyword research insights will continue to be powerful but again brands need to continue thinking out of the box in ways those insights can be paired/matched with highly topical and newsworthy stories such as -coming new Celebrities, new products ( products that anyone did not know they will exist), new locations, new flavours, new ways of doing things, others.

Anything that it is not worth sharing is not worth publishing.

The only key to be less reliant on SEO traffic ( those crazy top 10 boring ranking positions Google invented) is to produce AMAZING content that people never expected it could enquire about.

Once customers know you are not AVERAGE, they will not go to Google, they will go directly to your website or even better call you to ask for whatever they need to be answered.

I really admire the effort Rand is still putting into white board Friday. He looks inspirational and makes every topic exciting. Hands off to you Rand.

With all about SEO is dead and not working talks; this video is very inspirational and should give SEO's a new channel to work towards producing good quality information. I truly believe that Google's changes in 2013 would work in the best interest of the searchers as there would be more quality information available on the web.

My only concern is Google's over dependence on ranking brand higher for informational or product specific terms. Brands do not always offer the best quality/comparative information and also their products are priced exhaustively. I believe Google is not giving users much comparative search results. eg: Search for secured loans in the UK and all of the banks rank highly on page 1; and do not include some of the other big loan providers within the market.

Would love to hear if someone else has noticed this within their clients industry.

Awesome WBF Rand! So what you saying(stating, expressing, communicating) is that we need( require, necessitate, in need of) to start (begin, commence, initiate) writing for humans( people, bipedal talking mammals with thumbs and smartphones). I agree ( confirm, coincide) but some of us SEO are just having a trouble( problems, difficulties) adjusting. Enjoy your weekend everyone.

It may be more of a challenge now Rand but it makes us all be more mindful of the search topic at hand and as you say the 'intent' is what brings the relevancy...good thoughts to share with us and to redirect our efforts...thank you!

I'm still not 100% sure how going forward Google will be able to understand which websites are most relevant to a search query without paying as much attention to traditional on-page SEO factors. Surely keyword matching anchor text links and fully optimised page titles, URLs, headings etc will help Google understand the relevance of a page more than the general content/context of a page/site.

I don't think the value of on-page SEO factors are being reduced, just the typical keyword signals. The search engine is smart enough to know more about your website without solely relying on anchor text. It's getting smarter and is able to tie your brand/website to particular subjects and themes instead of singular words and phrases.

I definitely agree with your new model of SEO for a brand. I think you're right when you said that Google probably made our lives a little easier, and we just don't know it yet. The old Keyword-heavy SEO created so much unwanted overlapping of a Web site by having to build a landing page for each keyword we were trying to rank for.

I think these advancements with Hummingbird and broad match searches will actually help every legitimate content producer in the long run. The new model just looks so much simpler, so why is everyone all upset with the "Not Provided" keyword data?

I think we are headed in the right direction for offering more meaningful answers for users but keywords still do not provide the best way for people to find content. Yahoo recently purchased a company that is focusing heavily on Intelligent search tools where users can ask real world questions which are matched with the right FAQs for a site. This new search engine ensures that a a site has the ability to make any page an SEO strong landing page by using Natural Language Search. Companies now are competing to get into this market by recruiting NLS companies like Inbenta, and Skyphase because its giving their viewers information easier and faster. From a marketing stand point its much easier for viewers to just ask a real world question and have the security that they will get what they are looking for. From a company standpoint its a no brainer because their site becomes more customer service centric rather then just proving content. Even their customer support agents are able to use this new technology to cut down on the traffic they are getting. We are seeing the end of the keyword era and seeing the birth of intelligent searching.

GREAT WBF distinguishing the difference between keyword match & user intent pages! I'm sharing this video around the office to clarify how traditional landing pages differ from a more semantic page. Thanks again Rand

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